Substantive short articles on Marxian sociology
Antitrust and labor reformers can serve as complementary components of a progressive coalition to take power from corporations and govern corporations and markets in the public interest.
Does the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the US signal the breakdown of past alliances between workers and intellectuals, and the emergence of new cross-class coalitions? Or have the worker-intellectual alliances that were integral to social-democratic movements in the past endured in some form? A recent study by Chad Alan Goldberg and Masoud Movahed provides some answers.
The government emphasizes fukugyō as a means of free choice and achieving good work-family balance. However, the reality of fukugyō is often far from the ideal picture painted by the government. Fukugyō workers typically experience low wages, employment insecurity, a lack of social protection, and limited opportunities for upward career mobility.
The practice of ridicule proved crucial to creating a culture of resistant solidarity among the workers. In the presence of this solidarity, workers dared to engage in more practical acts of resistance. These included manipulating the algorithms, or using gaps of control for illegal breaks. In some cases, workers even engaged in outright sabotage.
For Du Bois, capitalism and racism do not only impose on the souls but also the soils of Black folk. In a century defined by the intersecting crises of capitalism, racist oppression, and global ecological degradation, Du Bois’s theories that detail their relation and offer a program to reimagine society as an abolition democracy, serve as a prescient guide.
That striking image of US-Brazil labor solidarity is only one snapshot of a transnational union partnership which has proved to be long-lasting and institutional, yet adaptable. New political, social and legal convergences have brought the labor movements of these two countries closer together over the past decade, as both are now contending with challenges to their representativeness and social legitimacy in times of extreme political polarization and growing labor precarity.
Are nurses, teachers and analysts the wave of the future? Are their jobs, and others like them, less suitable to capitalism’s extract-and-monetize model and do they possibly prefigure post-capitalist regimes? Questions like these have transfixed macro social scientists since the mid-twentieth century. Every twenty years or so theorists hem [...]
As capital’s social-ecological metabolic configuration moved closer to globality, particularly in the aftermath of the Great Acceleration in the mid-twentieth century, so too have its ecological rifts. These rifts, together with the social crises of the capitalist system, confront humanity in the twenty first century with the imminent threat of potentially unprecedented social-ecological devastation, and possibly even human extinction. Under these circumstances of intensifying crises, the need for a hegemonic alternative to capital’s social metabolic order has become correspondingly urgent.
Using the arts and humanities to suggest how society – including the economic system of capitalism -- could be transformed to promote health is even less common. German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht’s works can be excellent resources in efforts to accomplish this goal.
Our research, done in consultation with the hotel workers’ union, reveals on the one hand, a morbid correlation between the reopening of tourism and deaths across the state, and on the other, the life-affirming ethic of collective care, with unionized workers persistently pushing for safe hotels, recall rights, better pay, and the well-being of all hospitality workers, their communities, as well as tourists.
![Hundreds of male and female Shirtwaist strikers march to City Hall. Placard says "Union Contract [illegible]".](https://marxistsociology.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/5279167755_cffac09144_o-669x272.jpg)
